Skeddly Blog

Skeddly can be a powerful tool in creating scheduled manual snapshots of your RDS instances. It includes an action called “Create RDS Snapshot” which can create a snapshot of an RDS instance on your schedule.

However, by default, all Amazon Web Services accounts can only create 50 manual snapshots. So if you’re creating snapshots on a schedule, then sooner or later, you’ll hit that 50 snapshot limit. Of course, you can contact AWS support to have this limit raised if you really need to keep more than 50 manual snapshots. Keep in mind that you may be paying to store those snapshots.

If you don’t need to keep all of those snapshots, then use the “Delete RDS Snapshots” action built into Skeddly.

Using Skeddly, you are able to easily create EBS snapshots on a hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis. In addition, Skeddly can be configured to delete those snapshots based on age, and keeping a minimum number of snapshots. Simple backup and delete strategies can be created. But more advanced strategies can be created as well.

Goal

For example, let’s say that you want to create snapshots under the following schedule:

Until today, you had to register an Amazon Access Key with Skeddly in order for Skeddly to perform actions on your AWS resources. Access Keys are still supported, but a new, preferred, way has been added to Skeddly: IAM roles.

Our Backup MySQL Server action now supports VPC. Until now, the helper instance that is launched had to run outside of VPC.
Now we have added a field for your VPC’s Subnet ID (and optionally private IP address).

Using these new options, you can launch your helper instance inside your VPC so it can access your RDS instances inside your VPC.

Please note that spot instances currently do not support the assignment of a private IP address.